Tuesday, 20 February 2018

Hello John and welcome to My Jane Austen Book Club. I’d like to start our chat with a question that came to my mind as soon as I read you were publishing, Pride and Prometheus , a mash-up tale based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Do you think Jane and Mary could have ever been friends? (time lap apart)

I think that it would
be unlikely that they would be friends, if only because of their different life
choices. Jane was the conservative daughter of a clergyman and was raised in
polite upperclass British society. She cared about the strictures of society
and what was and was not proper behavior.

Mary was the daughter
of two radicals; her mother Mary Wollstonecraft wrote one of the first
arguments for women's equality, A
Vindication of the Rights of Women and
her father William Godwin was a supporter of the French Revolution. Mary ran
off with the poet Percy Shelley when she was seventeen while Shelley was still
married to his first wife. Shelley abandoned his wife and son to go off with
her. If Mary were a character in a Jane Austen novel, she would be the "bad
girl" or the "ruined woman" who violated every rule of society,
like Maria Bertram in Mansfield Park.

Thursday, 15 February 2018

With the advent of
e-books, readers now no longer have to go to the bookstore or library to pull
their favorite author’s work off the shelf. All they need to do is download a
copy and immediately start flipping pages.

Oh, yes…and that
flipping invariably happens on the first item nested in the Table of Contents.
In most cases, that is Chapter 1. What is rarely seen is the front cover.

Well, not exactly.
The reader certainly saw the cover when visiting the website from which the
book was obtained. And, yes, the cover does appear in a thumbnail form in the
e-book reader library. However, the postage stamp’s worth of color art does
little to provide anything more than the barest sense of theme and message.

Tuesday, 30 January 2018

Good morning, Maria Grazia! Thank you for hosting me at your blog, My Jane Austen Book Club. It’s a pleasure to be here to share an excerpt with your readers from my latest JAFF release, “The Sweetest Ruin,” which is a “Pride & Prejudice” modernization that’s set in Las Vegas, Nevada and London, England.

This excerpt takes place after a certain couple has spent some time together getting to know one another, wink, wink. I hope your readers enjoy this sneak peek into “The Sweetest Ruin...”

About Me

I've been an English teacher for a long time now and a blogger for more than 5 years. I love classic literature, reading, theatre, period drama, art and that is what I usually write about on FLY HIGH and My Jane Austen Book Club. I'd love to hear from you! Leave your comments to my posts or send e-mail messages to learnonline.mgs@gmail.com.